7 ms·

Nuclear Energy Will Not Be the Solution to Climate Change

23 points by voisin 5y ago

civilized 5y ago
https://outline.com/xUAxMG https://outline.com/xUAxMG
- brutusborn 5y ago
  Thankyou for posting this. It makes absorbing the article content so much easier!
dd36 5y ago
Is this more covert fossil fuel advocacy to forestall solutions? We should do any and everything.
- naranha 5y ago
  Yes, this seems to me like mostly FUD, because there is no line of reasoning to be found (I read it on outline.com). It says it takes too long to innovate, without any concrete evidence, afaik there are many innovative reactor designs waiting to be constructed. Maybe not next-gen, but better than past ones that need to be shutoff at some point. Also the old design PWRs still work well and can be constructed today within a few years, so definitely worth pursuing. Economically more viable than burning stuff that literally comes out of the ground and there is near endless supply but destroys the climate? Definitely not, but neither are renewables. The economy won't safe the climate. Arguments against nuclear would probably be fuel availability/harvesting and safety.
adrianN 5y ago
It probably doesn't hurt much to start building a couple of nuclear plants and to keep existing ones running a while longer. But it's pretty clear that renewables and storage have won and we should put most of our money behind them.
- crobertsbmw 5y ago
  Really? That’s not clear to me at all yet.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    They are almost competitive on electricity price and much less riksy to build, because they're not some double digit billion dollar project that finishes in fifteen years. Those seem like pretty strong arguments to me. Why do you think otherwise?
    - icegreentea2 5y ago
      I think it's because solar/wind and battery grid storage haven't reached a scale where their limitations are fully priced in yet. It's certainly clear that we want to have the highest proportion of solar/wind possible. What's not clear is how to distribute variability handling between grid-scale storage, nuclear/hydro, and long distance interconnects.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        When prices truly reflect the effects of large amounts of renewables on the grid, nuclear will be screwed. That's because prices will usually be very low (or even negative), and occasionally spike. This is an environment that is quite hostile to expensive baseload sources. Fossil fuels would beat nuclear for exploiting those spikes, even with insanely high CO2 taxes ($1000/ton, say).
        icegreentea2 5y ago
        My gut feel is that we'll end up with regulations putting a cap on retail (maybe not for industrial...) price variability and/or inserting in an extra fixed fee (similar to connection fees) in many jurisdictions to help out with keeping baseload around. I haven't done any of the math though. Like I want nuclear to just be cheaper than FF. But shrug.
civilized 5y ago
> But rather than placing unfounded faith in the ability of nuclear power to save the planet, we need to focus on the real threat: the changing climate. And we need strong government support of noncarbon-emitting energy technologies that are ready to be deployed today, not ten or 20 years from now, because we have run out of time. We cannot wait a minute longer. So, are those technologies actually ready to go? Or is there a different article about why those technologies are not immediately up to the challenge of battling climate change? Renewables will doubtless play an important role, but there are well-known reasons that they are not a panacea, such as the intermittency and storage issues. Beware of thinkpieces that talk about how good or bad X is without considering X relative to the alternatives. I forget where I read it first, but I recall some smart folks consider this to be the most common and elementary fallacy in policy deliberation.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Solar panels and wind turbines are ready to go. They can take you to at least 50% renewable electricity without help of any other more experimental technology. Heat pumps are ready to go in most climates. They can electrify almost all of your heating needs. Electric cars are ready to go for many use cases. They can electrify a large part of your transportation. Of course there is also technology that is a hundred years old and could help: better insulation for houses, better public transport and the like. While you introduce all of those technologies until they reach some point where they're not completely suitable yet, you have time to improve the cost effectiveness of the puzzle pieces that are only kind of available, like grid scale storage, long range transportation, various industrial processes, etc. Maybe it turns out that by the time we've electrified everything and taken renewables as far as they go without killing the grid somebody has come up with a modular molten salt Thorium reactor that can cheaply cover the remaining electricity needs. Maybe power2gas becomes amazingly cheap, or we discover awesome batteries. But it doesn't really make sense not to build as much renewables as you can and electrify as much as you can while you wait for that.
  - civilized 5y ago
    I support scaling up renewables. The question is, should we bet on the solution of fundamental unsolved science and engineering problems that currently keep them from scaling further? Or hedge our bets by scaling up nuclear to cover the gaps left by renewables?
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
BS. We need carbon extraction plants and Nuclear power to reverse the changes we are making to the planet.
- dd36 5y ago
  Yes! Carbon negative should be the goal.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  It's not at all clear we need nuclear power. It's not at all clear that nuclear power will have any significant place in powering civilization on Earth going forward. It has not been cheap, and if alternatives are easier and cheaper, why bother with nuclear at all?
  - gogopuppygogo 5y ago
    Quote from the work done to fact check if we need Nuclear: Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid. But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it. Here is the article: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      The pro-nuclear argument there goes back to some people at MIT, which was actually talking about the need for "firming sources" of power. Going 100% renewable with just batteries for storage has the problem of rare times when there's an extended lull in wind and lack of sunlight. But nuclear is not well suited to filling in those gaps. The firming source that makes more sense is hydrogen burned in combined cycle plants (which cost about $1/W, vs $10/W for a nuclear plant). The hydrogen would be made with excess renewables during times of plenty and stored underground, just as natural gas is stored today. With this storage technology (as well as batteries and the like for diurnal storage) renewables provide "synthetic baseload" supply and will likely do it at a cost that nuclear will find difficult to match. The relevant technological advance here has been low cost electrolyzers, suitable for use with intermittent power sources. These have been getting cheaper quite rapidly, and money is being pumped in to drive them down their experience curves just as PV and wind were driven down theirs previously. Any additional sources of storage and demand smoothing (transmission, industrial thermal storage, large scale production of synfuels, intermittent CO2 capture) tilts the balance toward renewables as well.
rob_c 5y ago
Unfortunately How to write a FUD article on Nuclear, 1. "we don't know if the reactors will save carbon over lifetime". Surely this is better than strip-mining most of the ocean and asia for rare-earth metals for circuitry and/or batteries. (Li-ion ones will be needed at a local (and hyper-local) level to store supply/demand fluctuations from renewables). 2. "boogey man". This used to be something like "Nixon backed this over thorium-salt", or "something, something, nuclear-weapons". Here it's "big bill" himself. The fact the gates foundation is investing in something should make the product be seen as common-sense, e.g. "in the future we need clean water". (And they want to be in a position to sell it back to you for nominal profit). 3. Bringing up long lead times. Lets be honest a huge amount of this is public opinion/pressure and political manoeuvring. Nuclear as a word has all of the cold war rhetoric (from all sides) attached to it. If governments wanted Fission plants built within a decade it would happen. As it stands globally many factors are squeezing Nuclear construction projects due to their admittedly _very high_ up-front costs compared to technologies such as Wind. The alternatives to starting this now and having it available in 10 years are, realistically, more coal plants. This is until renewables and energy storage take the next quantum step. Wind, sun, wave and other renewables are only useful for non-baseline energy production until we invest in huge (normally gravity derived) batteries, and these take a long time to plan/construct/build infrastructure for. 4. Safety Frankly I've always viewed this as a mute point. Had the Fukishima plant been in a country which doesn't have regular earthquakes/tsunamis it would still be 'just working'. Why the accident here should mean a plant in the lowlands of Germany (arbitrary geo-location) should close is entirely a political/posturing decision and not one based on science. 5. Not this article, but people mix the fusion/fission work into a mess. Fusion has been bigger on promise than it's delivered so-far. But frankly this is a no-brainer small annual investment given the potential cost/benefit ratios for clean power, and frankly how close we now are. Fission plants unfortunately do have nuclear waste. But then so do dead solar cells, dead lithium batteries, aged coal plants. There is nothing for free. But, when the nuclear waste can be captured in nice small drums and put at the bottom of a disused mine-shaft and sealed off from the environment isn't this the same ethos as carbon-(re-)capture on steroids?
- civilized 5y ago
  Nuclear waste storage is the most histrionically exaggerated environmental issue of all time. Yucca Mountain is rated to hold the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. We really only need about a hundred. After a hundred years, we'll probably have effectively unlimited energy sources and a space elevator, and we'll be able to chuck the stuff directly into the Sun if we're still fussed about it. Which we won't be, because the lack of accidents will have completely inured people to the existence of the waste storage sites, and my great grandkids will be whining about how they can't get funding for their cool Chuck Nuclear Waste Into The Sun Project. (And they will be right - society has always been stupid to not divert a little money into mitigating long-term existential risks!) People would rather let the planet literally burn to death with 100% certainty than take a 0.0001% risk on a leak of the scary radioactive stuff.
guscost 5y ago
Rather than go into a long rant about how this is bullshit FUD, I’ll just remind everyone that the founding donation to Friends of the Earth (anti-nuclear NGO) was made by Robert Orville Anderson, an oil baron.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969. Why do you think that’s relevant to policy decisions today over fifty years later?
belorn 5y ago
We are currently building new fossil fueled power plants all over the world, and in some cases as an response to closing down nuclear plants. If the argument is that nuclear power plants take too long to be an effective solution to climate change, building new fossil fueled power plants can't be the alternative. Rather than advocating against new nuclear power plants, start by advocating a complete stop against new fossil fuel power plants. As long we continue with renewing and expanding the capacity for fossil fueled energy, all the discussion about nuclear in the context of climate change becomes silly.
xoa 5y ago
I'm sorry, but duh? Is this controversial? Solar, wind and batteries are all now in the steep part of an S-curve and fundamentally have far stronger economics behind them on Earth for the foreseeable future. They don't require special military risk materials or restrictions, the core materials are widely available and cheap, they have massive multiple use, both centralized and highly decentralized usage cases, capability for amortization across a huge range of industries as well as residential, etc etc etc. Just like we've seen so many times before, it is unlikely to even matter if other solutions have certain strengths in certain cases: sheer scaling leading to enormous R&D, capital investment and refining of implementations trumps somewhat better features nearly every time. Same reason hydrogen is total dead end, debates about its merits frankly don't even matter in the same way debates about POWER/PowerPC or MIPS or Alpha or whatever ISA's merits vs x86 didn't particularly matter. Even thermonuclear fusion is probably just plain too late at this point to have any critical impact on AGW. Now, I strongly support both nuclear fission and fusion continuing to get development and investment, even if it needs to be government to do it. Fission has a lot of other non-energy very important use cases like medical or utility isotope mass production for which net energy production is a nice cherry on top. We'll also need nuclear power longer term for outer solar system exploration and development. Even in terms of pure power production, modular micronuclear could have a valuable role to play at latitudes near the poles or exotic situations. But there shouldn't be any illusions about where the train in general is going. Solar and wind resources are so abundant they can cover all energy needs, storage and grid improvements are massively efficient and help everything anyway, and they've all got the market behind them. Tipping point passed awhile ago. That's that.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > Same reason hydrogen is total dead end While hydrogen is overhyped for some applications (ground vehicles, heating), for some applications it may be essential (synthesis of ammonia and some other chemicals, reduction of iron ore to metal, seasonal grid energy storage.) So I would not call it a "total dead end".
acidburnNSA 5y ago
Incredible that this goes through slow and expensive builds yet fails to even mention the much better recent builds of the Hualong One (China), the VVER (Russia/various), and the APR-1400 (Korea/UAE) models of reactors. Who the heck edited this!?
- civilized 5y ago
  US policy thought is incredibly provincial. We refuse to learn from other countries, and not just on this issue. Consider our response to the COVID epidemic. In the wake of the SARS and H1N1 epidemics of 2003 and 2009, East Asia quickly came to understand that masks are critical to slowing the spread of highly contagious respiratory viruses. US policy elites had about 17 years to study and learn from this, but somehow they didn't, and we were caught with our pants down in 2020. US authorities initially argued that the public should not wear masks. Then we were pushed into ineffective cloth masks, with the rationale that health workers needed the more effective ones. Meanwhile, policymakers did everything they could to prevent the production and distribution of more effective masks. I don't exactly want the CCP to take over the US, but a bit of actual technocratic rule could go a long way here.
imtringued 5y ago
I would like mention a fundamental problem with the state of our current economy. The 2008 bailout killed all perceived risk of holding onto money. This resulted in extremely cautious saving behavior in corporations. These companies are looking for the next investment. They don't care what it is. If corporations are lenders then the rest of the economy must become borrowers. We don't want citizens to take that burden so the government takes the debt on. What's the macroeconomic function of saving? It's to make surplus resources available that can be used for investments. What those investments are doesn't really matter but here is an amazing opportunity: You can save the economy by fighting climate change. It's not one or the other, the second one directly leads to the first one. So, instead of letting the government take on debt we have to ask ourselves: "What do we have to do so that green investments become attractive to private companies?" Specifically, companies should be able to fund and build nuclear reactors to be able to profit off of them without government support (government insurance just means your tech isn't safe enough). If this is not possible (I hope it is possible) then we should look elsewhere.
jwlake 5y ago
I always feel like people that write these articles don't understand that energy pricing is the most regressive tax ever created. The world (read not US only) needs extremely cheap environmentally sound energy production far in excess of current capacity. Specifically China, India, Africa all need vastly more energy production to bring up their standard of living. Even the US would be greatly improved by vastly cheaper energy. Arguing against nuclear from the future mix of energy seems like it misses the boat global energy requirements and total environmental impact.
jeffbee 5y ago
There are still boomer zombies who hold a weekly anti-nuclear protest in Berkeley. Boomers are notably the biggest generation ever. Public opinion is going to be anti-nuclear until they’re dead and buried. You can’t fix it!
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Nuclear energy requires very little material handling to build and run. There will always be a use case for dense energy. California can import boutique sun grown energy from the deserts just fine. Germany can import Danish wind power. But some nations that would directly have to trade limited arable land for power and/or who do not have wide enough land area (or good enough relations with their neighbors) or grid capacity to roll out solar or wind will likely find that dropping in nuclear to replace fossil fuels is the most cost effective solution. Pretending that everyone is going to magically go to solar and wind and that hydro and nuclear will not at a bare minimum continue to exist for specific niches is foolish.
- harimau777 5y ago
  That makes sense. A potential obstacle could be that a nation that does not have good relations with their neighbors may often be a nation where nuclear energy would represent a military/proliferation risk.
karmakaze 5y ago
I'm tired of reading articles that say X is not the solution. Let researchers do research and find contributions that can avert disaster. It's not like the physicists working in nuclear can effectively be redirected to work on solar, wind, etc.

23 points by voisin 5y ago

civilized 5y ago

https://outline.com/xUAxMG https://outline.com/xUAxMG

brutusborn 5y ago
Thankyou for posting this. It makes absorbing the article content so much easier!

dd36 5y ago

Is this more covert fossil fuel advocacy to forestall solutions? We should do any and everything.

naranha 5y ago
Yes, this seems to me like mostly FUD, because there is no line of reasoning to be found (I read it on outline.com). It says it takes too long to innovate, without any concrete evidence, afaik there are many innovative reactor designs waiting to be constructed. Maybe not next-gen, but better than past ones that need to be shutoff at some point. Also the old design PWRs still work well and can be constructed today within a few years, so definitely worth pursuing. Economically more viable than burning stuff that literally comes out of the ground and there is near endless supply but destroys the climate? Definitely not, but neither are renewables. The economy won't safe the climate. Arguments against nuclear would probably be fuel availability/harvesting and safety.

adrianN 5y ago

It probably doesn't hurt much to start building a couple of nuclear plants and to keep existing ones running a while longer. But it's pretty clear that renewables and storage have won and we should put most of our money behind them.

crobertsbmw 5y ago
Really? That’s not clear to me at all yet.
- adrianN 5y ago
  They are almost competitive on electricity price and much less riksy to build, because they're not some double digit billion dollar project that finishes in fifteen years. Those seem like pretty strong arguments to me. Why do you think otherwise?
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    I think it's because solar/wind and battery grid storage haven't reached a scale where their limitations are fully priced in yet. It's certainly clear that we want to have the highest proportion of solar/wind possible. What's not clear is how to distribute variability handling between grid-scale storage, nuclear/hydro, and long distance interconnects.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      When prices truly reflect the effects of large amounts of renewables on the grid, nuclear will be screwed. That's because prices will usually be very low (or even negative), and occasionally spike. This is an environment that is quite hostile to expensive baseload sources. Fossil fuels would beat nuclear for exploiting those spikes, even with insanely high CO2 taxes ($1000/ton, say).
      - icegreentea2 5y ago
        My gut feel is that we'll end up with regulations putting a cap on retail (maybe not for industrial...) price variability and/or inserting in an extra fixed fee (similar to connection fees) in many jurisdictions to help out with keeping baseload around. I haven't done any of the math though. Like I want nuclear to just be cheaper than FF. But shrug.

civilized 5y ago

> But rather than placing unfounded faith in the ability of nuclear power to save the planet, we need to focus on the real threat: the changing climate. And we need strong government support of noncarbon-emitting energy technologies that are ready to be deployed today, not ten or 20 years from now, because we have run out of time. We cannot wait a minute longer. So, are those technologies actually ready to go? Or is there a different article about why those technologies are not immediately up to the challenge of battling climate change? Renewables will doubtless play an important role, but there are well-known reasons that they are not a panacea, such as the intermittency and storage issues. Beware of thinkpieces that talk about how good or bad X is without considering X relative to the alternatives. I forget where I read it first, but I recall some smart folks consider this to be the most common and elementary fallacy in policy deliberation.

adrianN 5y ago
Solar panels and wind turbines are ready to go. They can take you to at least 50% renewable electricity without help of any other more experimental technology. Heat pumps are ready to go in most climates. They can electrify almost all of your heating needs. Electric cars are ready to go for many use cases. They can electrify a large part of your transportation. Of course there is also technology that is a hundred years old and could help: better insulation for houses, better public transport and the like. While you introduce all of those technologies until they reach some point where they're not completely suitable yet, you have time to improve the cost effectiveness of the puzzle pieces that are only kind of available, like grid scale storage, long range transportation, various industrial processes, etc. Maybe it turns out that by the time we've electrified everything and taken renewables as far as they go without killing the grid somebody has come up with a modular molten salt Thorium reactor that can cheaply cover the remaining electricity needs. Maybe power2gas becomes amazingly cheap, or we discover awesome batteries. But it doesn't really make sense not to build as much renewables as you can and electrify as much as you can while you wait for that.
- civilized 5y ago
  I support scaling up renewables. The question is, should we bet on the solution of fundamental unsolved science and engineering problems that currently keep them from scaling further? Or hedge our bets by scaling up nuclear to cover the gaps left by renewables?

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

BS. We need carbon extraction plants and Nuclear power to reverse the changes we are making to the planet.

dd36 5y ago
Yes! Carbon negative should be the goal.
pfdietz 5y ago
It's not at all clear we need nuclear power. It's not at all clear that nuclear power will have any significant place in powering civilization on Earth going forward. It has not been cheap, and if alternatives are easier and cheaper, why bother with nuclear at all?
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  Quote from the work done to fact check if we need Nuclear: Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid. But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it. Here is the article: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    The pro-nuclear argument there goes back to some people at MIT, which was actually talking about the need for "firming sources" of power. Going 100% renewable with just batteries for storage has the problem of rare times when there's an extended lull in wind and lack of sunlight. But nuclear is not well suited to filling in those gaps. The firming source that makes more sense is hydrogen burned in combined cycle plants (which cost about $1/W, vs $10/W for a nuclear plant). The hydrogen would be made with excess renewables during times of plenty and stored underground, just as natural gas is stored today. With this storage technology (as well as batteries and the like for diurnal storage) renewables provide "synthetic baseload" supply and will likely do it at a cost that nuclear will find difficult to match. The relevant technological advance here has been low cost electrolyzers, suitable for use with intermittent power sources. These have been getting cheaper quite rapidly, and money is being pumped in to drive them down their experience curves just as PV and wind were driven down theirs previously. Any additional sources of storage and demand smoothing (transmission, industrial thermal storage, large scale production of synfuels, intermittent CO2 capture) tilts the balance toward renewables as well.

rob_c 5y ago

Unfortunately How to write a FUD article on Nuclear, 1. "we don't know if the reactors will save carbon over lifetime". Surely this is better than strip-mining most of the ocean and asia for rare-earth metals for circuitry and/or batteries. (Li-ion ones will be needed at a local (and hyper-local) level to store supply/demand fluctuations from renewables). 2. "boogey man". This used to be something like "Nixon backed this over thorium-salt", or "something, something, nuclear-weapons". Here it's "big bill" himself. The fact the gates foundation is investing in something should make the product be seen as common-sense, e.g. "in the future we need clean water". (And they want to be in a position to sell it back to you for nominal profit). 3. Bringing up long lead times. Lets be honest a huge amount of this is public opinion/pressure and political manoeuvring. Nuclear as a word has all of the cold war rhetoric (from all sides) attached to it. If governments wanted Fission plants built within a decade it would happen. As it stands globally many factors are squeezing Nuclear construction projects due to their admittedly _very high_ up-front costs compared to technologies such as Wind. The alternatives to starting this now and having it available in 10 years are, realistically, more coal plants. This is until renewables and energy storage take the next quantum step. Wind, sun, wave and other renewables are only useful for non-baseline energy production until we invest in huge (normally gravity derived) batteries, and these take a long time to plan/construct/build infrastructure for. 4. Safety Frankly I've always viewed this as a mute point. Had the Fukishima plant been in a country which doesn't have regular earthquakes/tsunamis it would still be 'just working'. Why the accident here should mean a plant in the lowlands of Germany (arbitrary geo-location) should close is entirely a political/posturing decision and not one based on science. 5. Not this article, but people mix the fusion/fission work into a mess. Fusion has been bigger on promise than it's delivered so-far. But frankly this is a no-brainer small annual investment given the potential cost/benefit ratios for clean power, and frankly how close we now are. Fission plants unfortunately do have nuclear waste. But then so do dead solar cells, dead lithium batteries, aged coal plants. There is nothing for free. But, when the nuclear waste can be captured in nice small drums and put at the bottom of a disused mine-shaft and sealed off from the environment isn't this the same ethos as carbon-(re-)capture on steroids?

civilized 5y ago
Nuclear waste storage is the most histrionically exaggerated environmental issue of all time. Yucca Mountain is rated to hold the stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. We really only need about a hundred. After a hundred years, we'll probably have effectively unlimited energy sources and a space elevator, and we'll be able to chuck the stuff directly into the Sun if we're still fussed about it. Which we won't be, because the lack of accidents will have completely inured people to the existence of the waste storage sites, and my great grandkids will be whining about how they can't get funding for their cool Chuck Nuclear Waste Into The Sun Project. (And they will be right - society has always been stupid to not divert a little money into mitigating long-term existential risks!) People would rather let the planet literally burn to death with 100% certainty than take a 0.0001% risk on a leak of the scary radioactive stuff.

guscost 5y ago

Rather than go into a long rant about how this is bullshit FUD, I’ll just remind everyone that the founding donation to Friends of the Earth (anti-nuclear NGO) was made by Robert Orville Anderson, an oil baron.

pavlov 5y ago
Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969. Why do you think that’s relevant to policy decisions today over fifty years later?

belorn 5y ago

We are currently building new fossil fueled power plants all over the world, and in some cases as an response to closing down nuclear plants. If the argument is that nuclear power plants take too long to be an effective solution to climate change, building new fossil fueled power plants can't be the alternative. Rather than advocating against new nuclear power plants, start by advocating a complete stop against new fossil fuel power plants. As long we continue with renewing and expanding the capacity for fossil fueled energy, all the discussion about nuclear in the context of climate change becomes silly.

xoa 5y ago

I'm sorry, but duh? Is this controversial? Solar, wind and batteries are all now in the steep part of an S-curve and fundamentally have far stronger economics behind them on Earth for the foreseeable future. They don't require special military risk materials or restrictions, the core materials are widely available and cheap, they have massive multiple use, both centralized and highly decentralized usage cases, capability for amortization across a huge range of industries as well as residential, etc etc etc. Just like we've seen so many times before, it is unlikely to even matter if other solutions have certain strengths in certain cases: sheer scaling leading to enormous R&D, capital investment and refining of implementations trumps somewhat better features nearly every time. Same reason hydrogen is total dead end, debates about its merits frankly don't even matter in the same way debates about POWER/PowerPC or MIPS or Alpha or whatever ISA's merits vs x86 didn't particularly matter. Even thermonuclear fusion is probably just plain too late at this point to have any critical impact on AGW. Now, I strongly support both nuclear fission and fusion continuing to get development and investment, even if it needs to be government to do it. Fission has a lot of other non-energy very important use cases like medical or utility isotope mass production for which net energy production is a nice cherry on top. We'll also need nuclear power longer term for outer solar system exploration and development. Even in terms of pure power production, modular micronuclear could have a valuable role to play at latitudes near the poles or exotic situations. But there shouldn't be any illusions about where the train in general is going. Solar and wind resources are so abundant they can cover all energy needs, storage and grid improvements are massively efficient and help everything anyway, and they've all got the market behind them. Tipping point passed awhile ago. That's that.

pfdietz 5y ago
> Same reason hydrogen is total dead end While hydrogen is overhyped for some applications (ground vehicles, heating), for some applications it may be essential (synthesis of ammonia and some other chemicals, reduction of iron ore to metal, seasonal grid energy storage.) So I would not call it a "total dead end".

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Incredible that this goes through slow and expensive builds yet fails to even mention the much better recent builds of the Hualong One (China), the VVER (Russia/various), and the APR-1400 (Korea/UAE) models of reactors. Who the heck edited this!?

civilized 5y ago
US policy thought is incredibly provincial. We refuse to learn from other countries, and not just on this issue. Consider our response to the COVID epidemic. In the wake of the SARS and H1N1 epidemics of 2003 and 2009, East Asia quickly came to understand that masks are critical to slowing the spread of highly contagious respiratory viruses. US policy elites had about 17 years to study and learn from this, but somehow they didn't, and we were caught with our pants down in 2020. US authorities initially argued that the public should not wear masks. Then we were pushed into ineffective cloth masks, with the rationale that health workers needed the more effective ones. Meanwhile, policymakers did everything they could to prevent the production and distribution of more effective masks. I don't exactly want the CCP to take over the US, but a bit of actual technocratic rule could go a long way here.

imtringued 5y ago

I would like mention a fundamental problem with the state of our current economy. The 2008 bailout killed all perceived risk of holding onto money. This resulted in extremely cautious saving behavior in corporations. These companies are looking for the next investment. They don't care what it is. If corporations are lenders then the rest of the economy must become borrowers. We don't want citizens to take that burden so the government takes the debt on. What's the macroeconomic function of saving? It's to make surplus resources available that can be used for investments. What those investments are doesn't really matter but here is an amazing opportunity: You can save the economy by fighting climate change. It's not one or the other, the second one directly leads to the first one. So, instead of letting the government take on debt we have to ask ourselves: "What do we have to do so that green investments become attractive to private companies?" Specifically, companies should be able to fund and build nuclear reactors to be able to profit off of them without government support (government insurance just means your tech isn't safe enough). If this is not possible (I hope it is possible) then we should look elsewhere.

jwlake 5y ago

I always feel like people that write these articles don't understand that energy pricing is the most regressive tax ever created. The world (read not US only) needs extremely cheap environmentally sound energy production far in excess of current capacity. Specifically China, India, Africa all need vastly more energy production to bring up their standard of living. Even the US would be greatly improved by vastly cheaper energy. Arguing against nuclear from the future mix of energy seems like it misses the boat global energy requirements and total environmental impact.

jeffbee 5y ago

There are still boomer zombies who hold a weekly anti-nuclear protest in Berkeley. Boomers are notably the biggest generation ever. Public opinion is going to be anti-nuclear until they’re dead and buried. You can’t fix it!

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Nuclear energy requires very little material handling to build and run. There will always be a use case for dense energy. California can import boutique sun grown energy from the deserts just fine. Germany can import Danish wind power. But some nations that would directly have to trade limited arable land for power and/or who do not have wide enough land area (or good enough relations with their neighbors) or grid capacity to roll out solar or wind will likely find that dropping in nuclear to replace fossil fuels is the most cost effective solution. Pretending that everyone is going to magically go to solar and wind and that hydro and nuclear will not at a bare minimum continue to exist for specific niches is foolish.

harimau777 5y ago
That makes sense. A potential obstacle could be that a nation that does not have good relations with their neighbors may often be a nation where nuclear energy would represent a military/proliferation risk.

karmakaze 5y ago

I'm tired of reading articles that say X is not the solution. Let researchers do research and find contributions that can avert disaster. It's not like the physicists working in nuclear can effectively be redirected to work on solar, wind, etc.